Brilliant collection of autobiographical essays from the late conceptual artist, photographer, writer and provocateur David Wojnarowicz. This man's troubled life has been documented in the film Postcards from America that tells of his being the victim of child abuse, his flight from home at 16, his time spent as a street hustler, eventual sucess as an artist and his tragic death from AIDS. This terrific book reveals David's brilliance to the world - his brain was open in a way that we classify as insane in our troubled society. David's insights into the failure of our system of life are poignant and very real. Only an excerpt can do this book justice: (This is a section of a poetic work, most of the work is in prose)
Self-Portrait in twnty-Three Rounds "So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze. I'd be lying if I were to tell you I could remember the smell of sweat as I hadn't even been born yet. Conception's just a shot in the dark. I'm supposed to be dead right now but I just woke up this dingo motherfucker having hit me across the head with a slab of marble that instead of splitting my head open laid a neat sliver of eyeglass lens through the bull's-eye center of my left eye. We were coming through this four-and-a-half day torture of little or no sleep. That's the breaks. We were staying at this one drag queen's house but her man did her wrong by being seen by some other queen with a vicious tongue in a darkened lot on the west side fucking some cute little puerto rican boy in the face and when me and my buddy knocked on door to try and get a mattress to lay down on she sent a bullet through the door thinking it was her man - after three days of no sleep and maybe a couple of stolen donuts my eyes start separating: one goes left and one goes right and after four days of sitting on some stoop on a side street head cradled in my arms seeing four hours of pairs of legs walking by too much traffic noise and junkies trying to rip us off and the sunlight so hot this is a new york summer I feel my brains slowly coming to a boil in whatever red-blue liquid the brains float in and looking down the street or walking around I begin to see large rats the size of shoeboxes..."
